June 1, 2026
Curses! The comments got spicy
Movwin: My (Unpublished) TUI Framework
He built his own terminal app system — then refused to release it and set off a comment war
TLDR: A developer built a fast, old-school text app framework but won’t release it yet because he fears AI firms will scrape and resell it. Commenters split between cheering the craftsmanship, debating whether retro terminal windows are cool or cursed, and offering fixes for Python’s speed problem.
A developer got fed up with ever-changing software toolkits, so he did the most internet thing possible: built his own. The project, called Movwin, is a text-only app framework inspired by old-school DOS-style windows and menus. It runs in Python, aims to be fast on ancient hardware, and tries very hard not to freak out when you paste in emoji. But the real plot twist? He says he won’t publish the code for now because he believes AI companies will vacuum it up and sell it anyway. And yes, that instantly became the emotional center of the conversation.
The comment section was a mix of sympathy, nerdy one-upmanship, and design snobbery. One person basically said, “I’m building a rival-ish thing too, and I want to benchmark yours,” while another offered a digital hug and mourned the state of the web: people loved the clean screenshots, the no-bloat site, and the old-school craftsmanship vibe. Then came the practical crowd, swooping in with a “good news, Python 3.15 has lazy imports coming” lifeline, like a medic arriving at the scene of a startup-speed crisis.
But the spiciest fight was over the look and feel. Some readers adored the retro window-and-menu style; others roasted it as shoving 1980s office software into a terminal. One commenter flat-out said windows and drop-downs don’t belong there at all, arguing that modern text tools like Emacs and Vim are where the truly interesting ideas live. So the community verdict? Cool project, understandable paranoia, and absolutely no agreement on whether terminal apps should look like 1989 forever.
Key Points
- •The author started building movwin, a personal TUI framework, after dissatisfaction with existing GUI/TUI libraries and began the project after Advent of Code in late December 2025.
- •movwin is currently unpublished; the article says the author decided not to release the code for now because of concerns about AI companies reusing published code despite licenses.
- •The framework is a Python library built on ncurses, using ncurses for terminal compatibility and input while avoiding ncurses subwindows and pads.
- •A major technical goal is acceptable Unicode handling, and movwin uses wcwidth's wcswidth() function to estimate terminal cell width for text such as emoji.
- •The author targets roughly 200–300 ms startup time on an older Intel NUC with a Celeron CPU and cites Python import overhead as a significant performance constraint.